Inspirations:<\/strong><\/p>\n I drew from a number of inspirations for this: The first, was from an old Star Wars game (Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy or something like that). In one of the levels, you crash your ship like an idiot, and have to hop across parts of broken ship to get to the end, but if you stand on the sand for too long, a big ol’ worm will burst out and eat you. This was the initial ‘Beneath the Surface’ concept that occured to me.<\/p>\n
I’d also been playing a tonne of Shadow of the Colossus, of which there are 3 or so Colossi that spend most of their time underground (or underwater). I wanted to do something similar, but also didn’t want to deal with fighting them; ‘Survival > Defeating’ for this concept, in terms of both gameplay, and what I could realistically accomplish in <30 hours.<\/p>\n
SO: I decided on underground stone snake-worm creatures, Guardians, that would become aggressive if you stood on their sand.<\/p>\n
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What worked:<\/strong><\/p>\n The visual aspects all worked! This was something I was pretty proud of, since I’m neither a modeller, nor a texturer. Because of that, the models aren’t actually textured properly – I just applied a sort-of-tileable texture to them, that I made from inside of Paint.NET (32×32 – 64×64 pixels = great visual consistency, because there isn’t enough detail for inconsistency)!<\/p>\n
The Guardian’s AI (mostly) worked! It was a very simple “AI system” – if player is on the sand, go to him. If we’re above x height, dive below, otherwise surface. If player is on a platform, dive, and just wonder around for a bit. To make it much more ‘robust’, I actually raycast above the Guardians head to check for terrain, and create a ‘Relative Y’ value; the terrain’s face’s position becomes y, instead of y= World Space 0. This means it’ll behave the same on hills or mountains as it would on ground level, rather than just take a WS value of 0 and find mountains unconquerable.<\/p>\n
For some reason, the AI goes weird in the WebPlayer build, and will often just wind up going around in circles for eternity. Some kind of surface-timer could probably fix this.<\/p>\n
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What didn’t work:<\/strong><\/p>\n Skybox was atrocious. I have no idea how to do them properly at all, so I just made a circular shape, distorted it, added a bunch of effects, and called it the sky. The other 5 textures of the skybox are just a 4x4p (I think) black texture.<\/p>\n
Ending was… Bad. So bad that I actually removed it. Not bad as in, “Wow, what a bad ending; that wasn’t satisfying at all,” bad as in glitch-bad (not even good glitches, either!). If I weren’t for work starting 4 hours after I submitted it, I’d have definitely either fixed it or replaced it (since there was still ~12 hours left of comp at that point).<\/p>\n
Sounds were bad. By the end of the comp, I was so sick and tired of the sounds that I just wanted to go soundless again (They were actually about 800% louder originally). People seemed to like the sounds for the most part, which I guess is good, but I hate the sounds now. Next time I’ll use placeholder sounds until I’m ready to submit it…<\/p>\n
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Overall:<\/strong><\/p>\n A lot of it all came together nicely, so overall I’m pretty happy with it! I learned a lot about how to cheat AI and keep it natural-looking, which is something I’ll be keen to exploit again in the future!<\/p>\n
Unity3D is still, by far, my favourite engine to use. I was able to prototype a lot of this stuff (after scrapping previous prototypes, too!) in such a short time, and achieve most of what I set out to do.<\/p>\n
Shadow of the Colossus was one of the greatest games of the PS2, and remains one of my biggest inspirations as a developer and pretend-designer.<\/p>","time":"May 2nd, 2014 5:26 am","title":"[Post-Mortem] So about that ending\u2026"}